lullabies for bad men
by youremyqueen
Summary: The adventures of a misunderstood hero, his lovable sidekick, and the continuously disenchanting and disappointing pseudo father figure who he sometimes fucks. (mello/l)


**warnings:** sex, age difference, pseudo incestuous undertones (no actual sex between related people, but rather people with familial-esque dynaimcs), violence.

**notes: **i was really proud of this fic when i first finished it, but the funny part is i wrote the first third or so of it drunk and when i went back and edited, the lines i had thought were really good at the time mostly made no fucking sense. so it goes. writing this kept me up at night and i loved it and i love this ship and will defend it to my death.

this takes place in a post-canon au where most everything happened as it did in canon, with the notable exceptions of L, mello, and matt's respective deaths, which were forgone in favor of sleazy, uncomfortable sex and hijinks. thank you for reading!

* * *

"You're like a father to me," Mello tells him, drunk, sweating and laughing and bathed in the thin, clear antiseptic smell of the morgue.

"That's an awful thing to say when I'm not wearing pants," L replies, unblinking, even as Mello slides a hand down his hip, seductive but clumsy, tittering like the teenager he'd so recently been.

They kiss and it's a little bit gross, like it always is, but hazy and ripe with the snowy 2 AM air that breathes in through the room's poorly ventilated corners. Mello grins, cheek knocking L's chin, and crawls into his lap. There is a serial strangler on the loose in Reykjavik, but tonight is not the night that they catch him.

* * *

It starts when Mello is nine and crying in the courtyard at Wammy's on a warm autumn noon. L is slinkily visiting, rarely seen but for shuffling trips to and from the kitchen, and while wheeling a cart containing both decomposed tissue samples and tiramisu stops to say, offhandedly, "Stop that. You're just fine. A B is just a letter and a murderer isn't going to care how you did in physics, anyway."

He walks on past after that and doesn't look back and Mello doesn't stop crying, but he feels it growing in him, like a seed.

He grows up and the roots break his skin. A tree of abandon, raining petals and foolhardiness, sprouts from his chest, and burns when the rest of him burns.

* * *

It ends when Mello is 14 and L dies, but it picks right up again when he is 19 and bandaged to the point of farce, unable to piss or eat or read the news on his own, clinging to Matt like a lifeboat in a dark itchy sea.

They get a voicemail on their shit apartment landline: "I'm alive, actually, so you don't have to keep blowing things up. Rest up, take plenty of vitamin B, and we'll convene when you're well and see to this Kira business."

Mello breaks the phone. He trashes the apartment. He can't see out of one eye but he can feel the hot angry tears wetting the medical tape on his face. "Fuck," he gasps, trying not to sob and failing the way he has become accustomed to. "Fuck, fuck, fuck."

"I know," Matt says into his hair and Mello gets his shirt sticky with snot and that's kindness, that's love, but it isn't enough.

"I can't I can't I can't," he breathes, hysteria mounting, his pain meds wearing off, everything blurring with the sick pale of dawn. Later, when he's been drunk and been sober and is staring with the eye that works at the cracked yellowing plaster of the ceiling, he says, "But I will," and Matt doesn't ask for context.

"I know you will, Mels," he says instead, and hands off his cigarette because that's what friends are for, and Mello likes to pretend in moments like this that Matt isn't a crutch and he isn't a dying man.

* * *

The first time Mello sees L in six years, five years after his supposed death, is in a church. They meet like spies at a dead drop, a Le Carre sort of affair, and L puts a dollar in the collection tin on his way in that Mello suffers the indignity, in front of God and everybody, of fishing out with his pinky finger.

This is an apology, it says, in scrawling black pen over old George's face.

Mello throws the dollar back in once's he's read it, mostly for God but also because it's a shit apology. He walks the empty cool aisle, warm light burning him up on all sides. He's had his bandages off for a week now and the skin is delicate, like a malformed newborn's, fresh and pitiable. Matt's never touched it but Mello knows he wants to.

"I didn't do any of it for you," Mello says, when he kneels down in the pew beside L's hunched back, ugly in a way that he's missed for years, that leaves his throat parched and his knuckles bloody with the rage, the unfairness and the cruelty, the stolen things. It's a lie but he doesn't know how else to say hello.

"I wouldn't have expected you to." L's voice is deeper. He sounds older, sober but still amused in that far off, half-asleep way he has. "Revenge is a fallible ambition."

"Everything's fallible," Mello says. He's trying to sound grown-up.

L smiles at him. The golden glow from the pulpit glints in his eyes. He looks like an old man in a child's body, but he is neither of those things. He'd be 30 now, wouldn't he? That seems miles too old for someone who's been dead for that latter half of Mello's life.

"I know," he says. "That's what I'm betting on to end this case."

* * *

It's a Sunday and Mello has missed service when he realizes that L is in love - or the uglier equivalent - with Light Yagami. They're watching recordings of Kira's Kingdom and L's got this satirical grin on his face, eyes watering from his stuttered laughs at a program that Mello finds genuinely horrifying, a sad commentary on the nature of humanity and its jeering, obsequious nature.

L says, "I bet he hates this," with a grim curve of his lip and then goes in the back room of his suite and locks the door and doesn't come out for two and a half days.

A few months later, after Mello almost burns to death for the second time and waits for the updates from his hospital bed, Yagami takes a half dozen bullets to the chest and L gives him a hero's funeral.

"Revealing his identity to the press would only make Kira into a martyr in the public's eyes, and we're already going to have enough trouble stamping out the budding fanaticism that's wormed its way into Japan's youth culture. Better to leave their hero faceless, especially with the kind of face Light has."

He's at Mello's bedside, eating the crap hospital gelatin off of his untouched tray. Matt's in a second chair, head tipped against the wall and chain-smoking his way through the lunch hour.

"I never thought he was that pretty," he breathes out with a mouthful of smoke.

"Had," L says, correcting his tense several moments too late. "The face he had."

"Don't grieve for him, L," Mello scoffs, feeling like a packaged good in his crisp, claustrophobic bedsheets.

L nods - "Wouldn't dare," - and moves onto a different subject, briefing them about the division of labor between himself and Near in the final moments, but Light's death sends him into an obvious deterioration that involves, in the coming months, symptom's including, but not limited to: tequila, growing his hair long and wearing it in unkempt ponytails, hiring and firing new operatives in rapid succession and, on one very lonely, cloudy London evening, making out with Mello against the bathroom sink with crime scene photos taped up on all the walls around them.

* * *

Matt, who has grown a small and pitiable goatee in order to impress a girl with tattoos at the corner pub, comes in and throws his e-cigarette on the coffee table the way one would relieve oneself of syphilis, if one possibly could.

"I don't know what pansy came up with this shit but I'm sure they're on some tropical island right now living off their fortune and being caressed by sun-kissed hula girls while I'm spending fourteen hours straight doing surveillance on planet earth's most boring drug cartel without even a real fucking fag to see me through it." He falls onto the violently expensive sofa and the mud from his boots smudges the leather.

Mello sits down next to him. "L kissed me," he says.

Matt is very still, body tensed like he's going to stand again. "Where?"

"Uh," Mello says, feeling years younger and a dozen battle scars less sure of himself, "on the mouth."

"No, I mean it wasn't on this couch, was it? I really don't want to have to stand up but I also don't want to be reclining next to the scene of attempted pseudo-incest." He grins then, makes a juvenile playground gagging face and Mello pinches the bridge of his nose and can't believe he's in this situation.

"It's not incest," he grunts.

"I said pseudo." In the next moment Matt's warm next to him, the familiar smell of sweat and coffee and shitty aftershave clogging his senses, hand wrapping around Mello's shoulder, smudged, stubby fingers plucking up the discarded e-cigarette to hand it off. "Here, you need this more than I do. Actually, I've got a stash of the real shit under the bed for emergencies. Is this a red alert or just middling orange?"

"How the fuck," Mello says, brushing his fingers through Matt's hair, "am I supposed to know the difference?"

"Well, was there tongue?"

Mello closes his eyes. L's body flush against his, grabbing his hair in the parts where it's mostly grown back, nose brushing his scar, fingers tapering down his vertebrae like counting claws. He groans. "Red. Red, red, red."

Matt goes and gets the good shit and they smoke all night, barely sleeping, sometimes touching, up early enough to find L's scrawled note of, "Solved the case. Gone for donuts. Be back soon," before housekeeping comes in and cleans it up.

* * *

Matt brings it up occasionally in a remember that one time sort of way, but L never mentions the kiss, or even appears from his manner to remember it, and within a week has Mello transported to a human trafficking case in Bangladesh, which takes three and a half weeks and reserves of foreign diplomacy that Mello didn't even know he had to solve, and just when, wired and sitting in his underwear at 2 AM, he puts it all together and brings it in to the local authorities, he finds that Near and his operation are already there and waiting to act on his information, snatching his triumph from him like a toy from a child.

"I like your haircut," Near tells him, while they're waiting in the police quarters with Halle and some weedy, bespectacled man that Mello doesn't know the name of. They haven't seen each other since shortly after the Kira case ended. Near is 18 and still the rough size of a prepubescent girl.

"You're getting uppity," Mello grunts back. "This was L's case. What right do you have to sweep in and call dibs?"

"I thought this was your case." Near hasn't got any toys but he is idly trading a pair of dice between his hands.

"Under L's authority."

"Are you always going to be under L's authority? Or are you just waiting for him to die again?"

Mello lunges across the table and knocks over a stack of magazines and Halle has a gun to his head before he can even make contact.

"I'm not gonna do any lasting damage," he huffs, but holds up his hands in surrender. "Just give him a well-earned thrashing."

Halle's expression doesn't crack but he can tell she'd missed him and it almost makes him miss her. "You know that it's my job not to let you do that," she says, slipping her gun smoothly back into its holster and retaking her seat.

"See," Mello says, "that I can respect. That's loyalty. A concept some people seem to have long abandoned."

Near doesn't look up from his dice. "I only pledge allegiance to things worthy of it. L is past his prime. I wish him well, but he's no longer suited for the job and I can't in good conscience defer to an authority I believe to be defective."

"You're gonna eat those words, and I'm gonna be the one spoon-feeding them to you." Mello's fingers dig into the arms of his chair. He's itchy to hit something or at least for a better cup of coffee.

"As long as you're doing it of your own volition and not on L's orders, I'm sure I won't mind."

Mello almost starts another tussle just to let off steam, but then the ringleader of the sex trafficking ring is brought in, followed shortly by his most important cohorts, and Mello's stuck for the next four hours doing paperwork before catching a plane back to London.

* * *

Matt's two days out on a case for the American government, looking into data breaches and leaks with Linda as his co-op - and sending Mello a steady stream of selfies in front of a variety of D.C. monuments - and so when Mello arrives back at the suite in Covent Garden, it is just him and L, home alone.

Their rooms are huge, though, and mostly filled with computer equipment and files, either taped to the walls or strewn in inconceivable patterns across the floors, and L hardly speaks to him about anything but cases, food, coffee, or, occasionally, Mello's fashion choices.

"Why leather trousers?" he asks him once, lying flat on his back in the middle of the living room, staring up at the ceiling fan, cellphone tucked between his ear and shoulder as he waits on hold for the President of Nigeria to make time for his call. He's not even facing Mello. "I understand how the look was applicable for your time in the mob, but why did you stick with it? I can't imagine they're particularly comfortable."

Mello blinks at him, fingers pausing over his laptop keyboard. "Is there something wrong with how I dress? Not professional enough?" he says deprecatingly, cocking an eyebrow at L's unchanged t-shirt and jeans combo of decades past.

"Not at all. It looks good. I'm just curious."

Mello stands up. He's not sure if this is something to stand up about, but he'd feel stupid sitting back down again so he just goes with it. He walks over to where L is sprawled and looks critically down at him.

"Are you hitting on me or something?"

"Maybe. The question still stands."

Mello feels his chest go a little tight and he grits his teeth, remembering Near's blank face and word defective. He turns around and walks back to his seat. "I like the way that people react to me when I dress like this. Either they're uncomfortable, they're interested, or they're both. I look dangerous. I am dangerous."

He doesn't even say stuff like this to Matt, because Matt has known him since before identity was something they could even conceptualize, was there the first time he jerked off and calming him down from the other end of the phone the first time he killed someone. He's too close to him to even see the clothes.

L has known him just as long but never half as well.

L is attracted to him and Mello doesn't know if that makes him feel uncomfortable, interested, or both.

* * *

It's eight days later and Mello has just gotten through negotiating between two rival London gangs to prevent an all out bloodbath on the streets, reciting the lines L had given him through the headpiece in terms that the men could actually understand and with a sharp glint in his eye that said that they better be understood, and he is tired, and there is dirt on his shoes, and he'd fired his gun twice today, if only just for show. He can still feel the kick rattling his finger bones.

He comes home and all the lights in the suite are on, the hum of the computers filling the space up with haunting mundanity. L is showering and he'd left the bathroom door cracked open and Mello walks in, pulls off his jacket and gloves, and sits on the closed toilet, dropping his head into his hands. There are other bathrooms but he goes into this one. He's tired of not talking about anything.

When L gets out his eyes are wide, but he always looks like that and Mello can't tell if he's surprised to find him there.

"Hello," he says casually, holding a dripping hand out. "Towel?"

Mello tosses him one from the hook on the wall. He watches as L, wet and naked and seemingly unaware of these things, steps out of the shower and dries off.

"Why did you kiss me?"

L looks at him consideringly, like it's just occurred to him to wonder about it. "Why did you set off an explosion that permanently scarred and disfigured you? We all do counterintuitive things in the heat of the moment."

If anyone else said something like that to him Mello would drop them out a window. Instead he just shakes his head and mumbles, "That's a terrible comparison. I was fighting for my life. You were just horny and miserable."

"Your use of the past tense is appreciated, if not entirely accurate." L's toweling off uncaringly, droplets falling from his hair and onto his pointy shoulders. He's broader than he makes himself out to be. Mello can see his limp cock hanging between his thighs and he wants to look away but he doesn't want to let L cow him.

"You're doing it again," he says instead, standing up, facing the issue head on instead of deferring to L's authority like he usually does. "Stop it. You're my boss, you're a decade older than me, and I've known you since before I even knew how to spell 'pedophilia.' I'm not going to pity-fuck you."

L tilts his head to this side and studies him, towel slung over his shoulder. "No, you're not, are you?" he agrees. He sounds bored and resigned and he leaves puddles all over the bathroom floor as he walks out.

* * *

Matt's scheduled to come home on a Tuesday, but then gets rerouted to go dismantle a rampant digital pyramid scheme based in Australia, and the next day L takes what supposed to be a round trip flight to Hong Kong to sort out a quick kidnapping - "Won't take me longer than 48 hours, and that's only if I take very long snack breaks," - but he never shows up at the airport where Mello's meant to pick him up.

He calls him four times, calls Matt twice that many, and manages only to get ahold of Linda, who's sorting out an international dispute involving a Bolivian diplomat living in the U.S. and what the press calls blowing funds on hookers and blow.

"I'm sure he's fine, Mel," she tells him. He can hear harp music playing in the background and muted chatter. "It's the middle of the night over there, anyway, isn't it?"

"That's not something that usually stops L picking up. Are you on a date?"

She stutters, then laughs, mumbling something to someone out of range. "Good detective work. I'm mingling. It's for the case, of course."

"Of course," Mello echoes flatly. "I thought you were fucking Matt?"

"If I see him," she says, voice hushed and giggly now. She always was a lightweight. "Which is at best only a couple times a year. Why? I thought you were, anyway."

Rarely, nowadays, but Mello doesn't say that. "I'm starting to feel like I see him about as often as you do. I'll let you mingle now. Talk later." He hangs up before she can say her goodbyes and a quarter of an hour later he gets a slightly misspelled text assuring him of L's safety and competence and explaining how Matt drinks too much lately for her to really want to go there anymore.

He calls L half a dozen more times, solves a local serial rape case from the tabloids alone, calls in the perp's name, and falls asleep in front of an infomercial about a variety of ugly and overpriced blenders.

* * *

It's two and a half days of silence and Mello's just booked a 500 pound ticket to Hong Kong International Airport when L walks into the suite, dressed in clothes that aren't his and smelling like a sewer. Mello's first thought when he hears the door is that there's a break-in going on and he greets L with his gun in one hand and a fistful of socks he'd been halfway through packing in the other.

"Where the fuck have you been," he says flatly, like someone's just let all the air out of him.

"Ran into trouble. Do we have anything to eat?"

L bypasses him, goes directly to the kitchenette and starts rifling through the fridge and Mello watches him like it's some horrifying natural disaster on the discovery channel.

"What kind of trouble? Did a brigade of rubbish-men ambush you or something?"

L doesn't laugh. Mello doesn't either.

He sighs, setting down his gun on the kitchen counter. "Are you okay?"

"Fine," L says, closing the door of the refrigerator. He's clutching a tub of raw cookie dough to his chest like a bulletproof vest. "A little worn around the edges, but so these things go." There's a beep and L fishes in his pocket, pulling out his phone to glance at the screen before dropping it back in. "You might want to let Matt know I'm alive and well. He'll keep calling otherwise."

"You still," Mello says, watching him slump down the hall towards his room, "have your phone."

"Yes." L, hands full with sweets, kicks the door closed behind himself.

Not a moment later, Mello's yanking it open. His pulse is hungry and roaring and deficient is spelling and respelling itself in his head and he really loathes for Near to be right about anything ever, but he loathes this too, the long-familiar feeling of playing second fiddle to a lead that's out of tune.

"And you didn't call," he continues directly.

L looks annoyed. He sets his haul down on the bed offhandedly. "That's correct."

Mello waits. He imagines a good explanation, unavoidable circumstances, apologies and heartfelt reunions or at the least brief, stunted recognition of his unease and subsequent guilt. He gets none of that. Of course. L is a machine and he never gives you what you want and that's why you keep struggling, writhing in his wake like a dying man after an explosion.

Mello is a dying man after an explosion.

He says, finally, after what feels like months of biting it back, "What the hell is wrong with you?"

L blinks at him. He looks more gaunt and more hollow than he had before he left but Mello can't tell if it's the lighting. "Do you have a few hours and a lobotomy handy?" he mumbles, the corner of his lip tugging up. He turns to pluck up a ball of cookie dough and pop it into his mouth, but Mello's there before he really makes the decision to be, grabbing his wrist.

"That wasn't a rhetorical question," he grits. "It isn't funny. It's not even sad anymore, it's just bad business. Whatever downward spiral you're on and however much longer you have it planned for, cut it short. It's blunt, but that's how it is. I got half my face burned off and I got over it. So, Kira died? Good. He deserved to. There's no more to it than that and if you were the man I thought you were, the man I was raised to believe in, you wouldn't let something like this hold you back."

He turns around, feeling like that's a good line to exit on, but his hand is on the doorknob when L barks a laugh, sharp and uncharacteristic.

"Oh, so that was rhetorical, then?" he says. He's angry; Mello's heard him angrier, but always tight, locked down. He sounds loose and uncaring now, a man well past niceties like reserve. "Come here." He curls his finger at Mello. "No, here, sit down, time for a lesson."

Mello doesn't sit. He doesn't move. "What are you going to do?" His jaw is tight and he feels like a misbehaving child. He must sound suspicious because L rolls his eyes and holds up his hands.

"Don't worry, your virtue is safe. I just want to explain to you a few of the flaws in your argument, since you're ever the eager student, the first of them being your assumption that I wasn't always like this. The man you were raised to believe in was a crock of shit and Near knows that and I think even Matt and Linda have picked it up by now, but you're still rejecting reality in favor of some hero-figure in your head who doesn't exist and never did."

His voice is so flat as he speaks and Mello feels like someone has cut the wires holding him together. He can feel the oncoming storm.

"Secondly," L says, tipping himself of the bed to slump forward and take Mello's cheek in his hand, palm clammy and cold, "this." His finger pads chafe on Mello's scar. Even with his hunch L's still taller than him. "You made a series of bad - maybe necessary, but inarguably bad - decisions, got yourself in a load of trouble, and did this to yourself. And yet, you pull it out like the ultimate trump card, like it's a stain on the machinery and not just part of it now." He drops his hand. Mello feels like part of him chips off with it. "We all have scars, Mihael. Just because yours is right there for everyone to see doesn't make it worth more."

He turns back to the bed. Mello's eyes sting hot and the room is a blur when he stumbles forward, missing the first time when he grabs at L's arm, but catching it the second. He's coiled, like a missile, launching forward gracelessly and slamming L against the bed, so that he falls chest first under Mello's body, the crinkle of tissue paper and cellophane hissing with the collision. Mello wants to say something but doesn't know what to say, and then L is head-butting him backwards, knocking him off, and roundhouse-kicking him into the night-table. He knocks over a lamp and the room gets two-thirds darker.

"Ow," L says, and Mello hates him so much in that moment it's roaring in him.

He pulls himself up, leather squelching sticky against his body. He's sweating and he might cry and he hasn't been so upset over something so stupid since he was a child and he just hits. He hits and he hits and he doesn't even really notice that L is grunting in pain until he sees the blood on his knuckles, watching as the balls of L's feet collide with his chest and send him sprawling back, shoulder slamming into the doorframe.

He's breathing heavily and he can hear it more than he can feel it. L wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, smudging blood against his cheek, and Mello swallows back the burning in his throat, feeling at once guilty and unendingly gratified.

"I did it for you," he says. He touches his scar. It feels like it could still be burning. "In your memory." He laughs through the words and L's face tightens. Mello thinks maybe he's going to hit him again. "I was lying before. What a chump, right?"

Out of the corner of his eye he watches L walk slowly toward him, then slump down on the other side of the door frame, back pressed opposite of where Mello, without really noticing, has curled up in a cheap imitation of L's usual position. He's brought the container of cookie dough with him and it slurs his speech as he chews it.

"I bet you wish I'd actually died now, don't you?" he says. "You could have remembered your false idol fondly."

"Oh, shut-up," Mello tells him, wiping one of his eyes discreetly. He thinks L notices anyway. "Do you do anything but throw yourself pity parties?"

"No. Sometimes I throw them for other people, but they're all dead."

Mello tips his head back against the wall, jutting out his chin, regaining his breath. "I think I could use one right about now."

"Yes," L agrees, blood drying on his cheek. "You probably could."

Matt arrives home twenty minutes later, with an introductory cry of, "Guess who brought souvenirs, asshole!" to find them there on the bedroom floor, eating cookie dough and talking shit about Wammy's House next to the broken lamp and the momentarily discarded shards of their respective egos.

* * *

Two young girls are found dead in a lake in Newfoundland and L and Mello are shacked up in a cramped motel room that looks like it was last cleaned in the mid-sixties and makes up for in rats what it lacks in amenities. It's rained constantly for the three days that they've been here and every item of clothing that Mello owns is either partly soggy, mostly soggy, or thoroughly drenched.

He comes in with a stack of files from the local police department, who had found the task of scanning and emailing to be far beyond their capabilities, tucked into his jacket to shield them from the rain. He'd left his umbrella in the department waiting room and he'd been too agitated to go back and get it.

"Another body was found," L says. He's comparatively dry, wrapped in a large and suspiciously stained blanket with a mug of something that looks hot in his hands, drooping glassy-eyed in front of a television news program where a harangued looking woman narrates a constantly played and replayed twelve second clip of a greying, pixilated body being pulled to shore by a group of uniformed men.

"Two, actually," Mello says, passing him the files on the way to the bathroom. "They're keeping it from the press for now, but I bet it'll break by tomorrow. New evidence, abrasions or something." The bulbs over the sink burn yellow as he strips off his wet clothes and throws them over the shower rail to dry out, breaking into the grey-green dim of the outer-room. He doesn't bother to shut the door.

"It's an inside job," L says, then makes an ugly squelching sound on the rim his mug. "I made hot coca."

"Wait, what?" Mello swings out into the room, towel over his shoulder, hanging onto the doorframe and frowning.

L looks at him, blinks a few times, and Mello only really registers that he's shirtless and half out of his trousers then. "Cocoa," L repeats.

Mello swallows. L's still looking at him, his chest, down his stomach to his hipbones and he likes it, he likes what he sees, and that's fucked up, isn't it? Mello had still pissed his bed at night sometimes the first time he'd met L, thought of him like the older brother he never had - and still didn't have in L - dreamt of making him proud one day the way one does one's parents. Parents don't look at you like that, nor brothers, unless you're in a really shit sort of family.

"No, the other thing," Mello says after a moment, but he goes over to the counter and takes the mug anyway, still mostly undressed. He watches L to see if he's still looking and L watches Mello watching him.

"Either that, or this department's just incompetent. The first body washed up a month ago, the second a week after that, but they're only dragging the lake now and only because of media pressure. Somebody's either hindering the investigation purposefully or is just plain bad at their job, and corruption is usually the safe bet. 95% certain."

Mello sips his cocoa. It's good. "That percentage is totally made up."

"Yes," L agrees. "Should I apologize?" His eyes are on Mello's crotch and he probably isn't talking about percentages.

Mello takes a couple of steps forward. "For what?"

"Looking."

He flicks his eyes up to Mello's and Mello's pulse lights up and he should end this conversation here but he doesn't. He keeps taking steps forward, maybe just to see if there's some line, some alarm bell that will go off it he gets too close and stop him doing something stupid.

"Do you feel apologetic?" he asks. He takes another sip of his cocoa and then sets it down on the mold-colored countertop.

L tilts his head to the side. The TV is still talking to itself in the background, playing the same clip. "For some things. Not the right ones, I don't think." He shakes his head, sets the moment aside, says, "Restart the router, will you? The network's been shoddy," and looks away.

But Mello does not restart the router. He doesn't care if the network's been shoddy. He's not going to take orders and he's not going to be afraid and he walks slowly and pointedly across the room, giving the alarm bells ample time to sound, the universe plenty of opportunity to reroute his course, but ultimately ends up standing over L, half-naked and quite proud of himself.

"I thought I loved you for a while," he says, "when I was a kid. Platonically, of course, although I didn't really consider distinctions like that at the time. I just loved you. Then I grew up and things like that became an embarrassing weakness, and by the time I was past that phase, you'd died and come back to life and I blew myself up and everything was shit and you were supposed to fix it but you didn't." His voice is low, the kind you'd use to seduce. He lets the towel drop from his shoulders.

"No," L echoes, looking up at him with wide, hollow, hungry eyes, "I didn't." He looks small and strange and otherworldly in his ugly blanket. Like a slightly more attractive E.T.

Mello crawls into his lap with debilitating languidness, letting his trousers drop all the way off. He's mostly naked and L's fully clothed and that's kind of gross, and kind of scary, and makes him kind of hard, so when he leans forward and presses their lips together, softly and then harder - hard hard hard and angry and cloying, smells a little like childhood and a little like mildew - he hurriedly grabs at L's shirt and tugs it off over his head.

"This isn't my idea," L says, before kissing him back. "I object to this strongly on moral grounds." His mouth is muffled against Mello's and he's grabbing his ass. "Despicable stuff." His jeans come off easily and his legs spread easier, body arching, hips grinding against Mello's. "I - "

"Shut-up," Mello grits in his ear, and L sort of quivers and grins and rubs their cocks together.

"Okay."

* * *

L makes dazed expressions during sex, like he's not really there, but he gasps and jerks and says things like, "No, to the left, to the - yes," that seem to suggest his investment. He kisses Mello's cheeks, his eyelids and temples, long fingers jittery on his shoulders, things that should be gross and tender and fatherly, but are instead hot. He's 30, but he fucks like a teenager, and Mello jerks and groans guiltily, like he's the offender who should know better.

It happens four times before they talk about it, and even then the conversation is little more than:

"Did you want to be on top?"

"Did you want me to?"

"No."

"Then no."

Mello is more comfortable being predatory than being preyed upon, and it's easier to take L's orders and deal with his blank heartlessness if he can bend him over the sofa of whatever room they're in for whatever case and balance the scale. It sounds ugly put like that, and it feels ugly, too.

It's number five and Mello had almost mentioned it to Matt twice at the pub yesterday, but he hadn't, had decided not to go there again, just let it die, but then L solves a case for the British government that Mello had point on without even leaving his bedroom and it stirs in him an impotent jealousy usually reserved for Near, and so he storms in on L, who's midway through a bowl of Cocopops, milk stains on his shirt and hair remarkably rumpled for someone who hadn't slept on it, and pins him down and makes himself feel better.

L's bitten-down nails dig into his back and he wraps Mello's hips up in his spindly legs and it's really a picturesque, dictionary definition of bad. Matt is out in the living room listening to Brit-pop and tracking feeds and L's phone rings twice and Mello doesn't let him get it. He comes gasping, old sensory imagery from his childhood encasing the pleasure like cellophane.

He shoves up and out of the bed before he even catches his breath, spurred into reviled action by his orgasm rather than depleted. He tugs off the condom, throws it in the bin, then layers a stack of unused tissues over it in case of the unlikely eventuality that Matt happens to come in and see it and use his third-ranked deductive skills to come to the very obvious conclusion that Mello is boinking their boss.

L is still on the bed, legs spread at the knees, sweat on his face, shameless and studying the ceiling. Mello watches him, the cool dank lines of his body, half-clothed and visibly winded, and feels like a slip of a person, standing naked from head to toe, scarred shoulder bright and ugly in the slats of setting sun that slice into the room through the closed blinds. The room is dark, but glowing at the edges. He feels sick.

L's mouth twitches, grin forming slowly, eyes hazy.

"What's funny?" Mello snaps, feeling even more high strung than he had before the sex.

"Oh, all of it. Don't you think?" L looks like he's having this conversation with the crown molding. Mello feels like a spectator. He feels like a bad person.

The first time hadn't been bad. It had been comfortable, like a sleepover with an old and valued friend. Every time since then, though, has made him increasingly uneasy, like he's touched something dirty and now it's all over his hands. Might as well roll in it.

He starts tugging on his trousers, which is difficult because his legs are still slick with sweat and the leather chafes. "I'm going to buy cigarettes." He gropes around for his shirt.

L glances over at him, eyebrows up. He looks vaguely sardonic but he had all through the fucking, too. "You don't smoke," he says.

"They're for Matt."

"Matt's trying to quit."

"Trying, but failing." Mello can only find one of his boots and the light is dimming fast. He feels itchy and tired, like a junkie down from a high.

L sits up. "You're upset," he points out, and Mello wants to punch him except he outgrew that old playground urge and now it's strictly guns and grins and blowing the top off of everybody's world, and his gun's in his bedroom.

"Are you this inept with everybody you fuck, or is it just me?" he snaps, without meaning to, immediately wanting to eat the words out of the air. He can feel himself being an asshole but he doesn't know how to stop it. He wants it to hurt but he's not sure why. L's just sitting there and that hurts him.

"Well," L says after a long frowning moment, "you're not special."

Mello tries not to let that break the skin but it does, and he storms out, still only with one shoe on. Matt's on the sofa in the living room, feet kicked up on a stack of files that decorates the coffee table. He tugs his headphones down to his shoulders when he sees Mello and asks, "You alright, mate?" tone flat with concern, because it's not like he's unused to this sort of thing.

L barrels out of his room a moment later and Mello's momentarily stunned because he didn't expect him to care enough to follow. "What?" he calls, like Mello's farther away than he is, continuing their conversation on from before like Matt isn't even there. "Did you want to be?"

"I'm going to get you cigarettes," Mello tells Matt a little more vehemently than is warranted, pointedly ignoring L.

"Uh, I'm trying to quit." Matt waves his much loathed e-cigarette at him but Mello's already halfway out the door, wearing Matt's trainers because fuck if he's sticking around to dig up his own.

"I did say that," he hears L mumble, before it slams behind him.

* * *

He comes home two and a half hours later, slightly drunk and without a single cigarette, to find Matt and L on opposite ends of the sofa, sharing a bag of red licorice and watching a program on the nature channel about the hunting rituals of the African plains.

"We're taking the night off," Matt tells him, knocking a pillow to the floor to make room and holding out a half-drained beer can to him. L's eyes flick to Mello, eyebrows raising, inviting but not without reservations, and if Matt had figured anything out and if they'd discussed Mello's bedroom performance in detail, comparing notes and averaging scores, there's no particular indication either way.

"What if there's an emergency?" Mello asks, but he takes the beer and takes the seat.

L holds out the bag of licorice twists to him. "If it's anything short of an epidemic of spontaneous heart attacks among the prison population, they'll have to wait until I find out exactly how the Western African lion devours its prey." It's maybe in bad taste but Matt snorts and, grudgingly, more as a peace gesture than out of actual amusement, Mello does, too.

Hours and many beers later, the night is blurred and warm and Matt is snoring with his arms thrown wide and his hand limp against Mello's scalp. L and Mello keep looking at each other and, for top ranking detectives, they're not very subtle about it. Mello's pulse kicks up and he's starting to feel sick again, starting to notice the attractive jut of L's collarbones, starting to fall asleep tucked against him.

He'd thought they'd agreed to let it go, so when L grips Mello softly by his chin and tilts his face up so that they're level, he freezes. He's half afraid and half excited at the possibility that L's going to kiss him, initiate it for the first time since before the first time. He doesn't.

"Are you panicking," he asks instead, "just to watch me care?"

He looks dead serious about it even though the words are far too fruity and romantic, and even slightly drunk, Mello wouldn't say them. "This isn't a love story," he tells him, jerking out of L's grip, and that's an even stupider thing to say. Maybe he's drunker than he thought; maybe he's just stupider.

"That's not what I asked."

The program about Africa is over and now it's just commercials, the volume down low, but the eerie fluorescent color spectrum of the TV screen painting L in faded blues and reds and greens. Mello's very tired and they're both too old for this. He leans his head against L's shoulder. It's too bony to be comfortable, but it's warm and breathing and familiar and treasured.

He falls asleep like that and when he wakes in the morning the TV's off, L is gone, and Matt's spooning him.

* * *

The sixth time is slow and quiet and Mello isn't angry. They've just solved a very long case centering on a very bad man, the sort that racks up a tally of brutalized bodies that makes one wish, just for a moment in a fleeting, dirty fantasy sort of way, that Kira was still around to clean up garbage like this. That's not how it works, though. They don't get to choose the blacks and whites. That's what L tells him, straddling his lap and gripping his face in his hands. It's a windy autumn day and the windows are all open. It's not raining out but it looks like it could.

L kisses the bridge of his nose halfway through and his eyelashes tickle Mello's forehead, making him laugh, and L's right, there's nothing about this that isn't funny, just like there's nothing about this that isn't wrong, but it's okay. It'll be okay. Even Matt had said so.

Whether or not he and L had talked it out that last time, after the fight, he seemed to have figured it out anyway, because the next time he and Mello had been alone together he'd kicked back beside him, resignedly puffing at his e-cigarette, and said, "So, incest, huh?"

Mello had been caught off guard, but he thinks he'd handled it well. "Pseudo," he'd corrected, and that had been enough to make it okay. Matt had been comforted, also, when Mello had told him he was a better lay, even if he can't decide if it's entirely true.

L's not good in bed, is so unapologetically bad, in fact, that it makes it good. He feels safe and strange, a cold cot to lie down in and sink.

Afterwards, the rain starts to patter on the roof. One of them should shut the window but neither of them gets up.

"What did you mean," Mello asks him after a while, "about scars, that time? The lesson, you know, my face." He doesn't want to have to ring anymore bells than that because he's still sort of embarrassed and he's still sure L was a tool about it.

L turns to face him. He looks almost handsome in the grey light. "You want to know about mine?"

"No." He pauses. "Well, yeah. It's not like I think you're lying, I just, well none of us really know anything about you. And that's fine except now that I've blown you I think I deserve to know something. Besides old cases." He's being far more awkward than he's used to. He shakes his head, shrugging it off. "Whatever, it's just. Pillow talk. It's stupid."

L doesn't stop looking at him. After a little while, he says, "Everyone I have loved is dead." He snorts. "God, that sounds maudlin, doesn't it? I helped kill a good percentage of them, so it's not like I can complain, but I'm very lonely now."

Mello's looking at him skeptically, half wondering if this is just some tragic hero hard sell to making him offer another blow job, but L doesn't do things like that. He's never wanted sympathy-fucks, just pity-fucks. They're different.

"I know, I know, poor me, right?" He tucks a hand under his head and he looks almost amused. "I was way too absorbed in my own ego before to want to be anything but alone, and it's not like I've improved or anything, I've just corroded. 'The machinery is breaking down.' That's what Near said to me last time we had a call. 'Time for a new model.' He went into a whole spiel about Macintosh and the progression of technology and took the metaphor a little too far, I think, and I tuned out, but his base point wasn't wrong. I'm getting old. I'm almost 31 and I miss everyone so much, even the ones I didn't like at all. The world moved on without me and I think my whole narrative arc would have gone better if I'd died with Kira, but sitting around thinking about that is too pathetic." He pauses, looks at his hands as if checking for age, then says, "I do it, anyway."

"That's your tragic secret?" Mello asks, grinning, joking and feeling grateful that he can, that panic isn't necessary and maybe the dictionary lied about bad. "That you're getting old? That's so lame."

"You blew up your own face and you want to talk to me about lame?" L's almost grinning back, if L could grin.

It should hurt to hear that, and it kind of does, but in the slow, kind, aching way that a muscle hurts after a good work out.

After a bit of this, Mello goes out and puts on the kettle. The world is safe today, even with all the bad men out there and maybe no God to count their sins. This isn't a love story, but he thinks he loves L, anyway. The way you love a brother, or a disappointing uncle. An uncle who you fuck.

That shouldn't be okay, but it is.

* * *

**fin.**


End file.
